


There is no other who knows you

by 8611



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Immortality, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:02:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25743277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: Gideon dreams of a specter, dreams of a girl with coal dust eyes and sandy skin standing on the edge of an ocean of desert. |The Locked Tomb x The Old Guard.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Dulcinea Septimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 89





	There is no other who knows you

**Author's Note:**

> _Shows up ~~20 minutes~~ six years late with Starbucks._ That’s right friends, I’m back on my bullshit. 
> 
> The title and several lines in here come from various translations of ‘The Great Hymn to Aten’, a hymn-poem from the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. Other helpful info:
> 
>  **Harwahedjet “Harrow” of Waset** , born 1345 BCE. Member of the Medjay. 22 at time of first death.  
>  **Scholarchēs Palamedes of Sestos** , born 403 BCE. Scholar of the Academy and skilled wrestler. 31 at time of first death.  
>  **Camilla Heius Dimachaerus of Rome** , born 60 CE. Volunteer gladiator. 29 at time of first death.  
>  **Gideon Zell of Cölln** , born 1501. Soldier in the Four Years War from 1522-1524. 23 at time of first death.

There is a storm coming. She can feel it swirling at the back of her throat, can sense the pall of claustrophobia rising in the air. 

She wipes a hand across her brow as the dampness beads sweat on her skin, and then returns her palm to the pommel of her sword, grasps it tightly as she moves through the underbrush, running parallel to the city wall. The element of stealth she has not - she sounds like a draft horse crashing through the half-dead autumn brush, her arquebus bouncing on her back in time to her steps. 

_ Thunk-crush. Thunk-crush. Thunk-crush. _

The first fat drops of rain hit as the guard steps out in front of her. She can see now her mistake, can see where she went wrong. There's a gate, hidden around a corner and behind a tree, but a gate nonetheless, and e very damn gate into this city is guarded tooth and nail presently due to the pitch of battle going on around it. 

Her single saving grace is that he seems as surprised to see her as she is to see him. They both pause for the briefest moment, rain starting to drum down on both of them, rattling off of metal and leather. 

He raises his musket in the greying light. Gideon charges, zweihänder leading the way _._

\---

Rain patters softly on Gideon’s bright yellow umbrella. She watches the drops splash to the wet pavement over the top of her phone, the glow a bit sickly in the late afternoon light. 

A figure slips into line ahead of her, hunched under a hooded raincoat. Gideon moves towards the person automatically, offering up half of her umbrella as the woman pushes her hood back and shakes her hair out, sending a few drops of water flying off of her fringe. 

“Bit late in the day for yum cha,” Camilla notes dryly. 

“There’s no such thing as a wrong time for dim sum,” Gideon says back. “How’d you find me?”

“Harrow spilled,” Cam says. 

Gideon cracks a crooked grin. 

\---

There are flurries falling softly in Milan, gathering in the cracks and gaps of the cobbles and making the world a slippery hellscape. 

Gideon turns her face up into the snow, letting it feather against her freckled skin. 

“You’re going to walk into something,” Harrow says primly from her side. 

Gideon tilts her head to grin down at her with a knife-sharp smirk. Yellow light from the stores spills out behind Harrow, wicking from her curls and giving her a halo. Or, actually -

“ _ At daybreak, when thou arisest on the horizon, _ ” Gideon quotes, can feel her grin ticking up as Harrow realizes by the third word what it is and starts rolling her eyes. 

“One day, I’ll translate that damn thing myself for you, that translation is  _ horrid _ ,” Harrow says.

“So you always say,” Gideon says, and holds out a hand to Harrow. She slips under Gideon’s arm with a quiet sigh, tucks herself against Gideon tight, and laces their fingers together. 

\---

By the grace of the rain, the guard can’t get the shot off, can’t get the flint to strike as the hammer comes down impotently. 

Gideon’s on him like a battering ram, bowling into him, can feel her sword hit his armor in just the right infuriating spot to slide away. He’s a small man, a boy probably, and even though she’ll never have the mass or the muscle of the men who toil in the army with her, she can certainly take down this one child. 

She spins off of him, sword held at the ready, fringe matted to her forehead. She is breathing like she’s run a sprint, breathing through a grin that’s all teeth and chapped lips and the rising fog of a good fight. 

Her second strike takes him between the plates, sinks home, finds purchase and sinew. 

He jerks, reaches to scrabble at her, nails and calluses tucked behind gloves.

She does not see the knife until it is too late. 

\---

Gideon dreams of a specter, dreams of a girl with coal dust eyes and sandy skin standing on the edge of an ocean of desert. 

Gideon dreams of ghosts, a man cloaked in grey and a woman who wields two swords. 

\---

The first thing Gideon is aware of is pain. It feels like fire, licking up her neck and across one side of her head. 

With a groan, she rolls onto her back and stares into the sunny sky. Her arquebus digs into her back and some of her plate metal seems to be sitting strangely, digging into her. 

The sun sears her eyes, and she closes them with a heavy sigh, throwing a hand across her face for good measure. 

“There’s one over here!” Someone shouts. Gideon frowns into the dark she’s created, licks her dry lips. 

“Alive or dead?” A second voice asks. They’re coming closer, trampling through the long grasses like Gideon had done. 

Her frown deepens. She’d come to this place, sword raised. What had happened to the boy who’d taken her blade?

“I think alive,” The first voice says. 

“Yes, I’m alive, thank you very much for noticing,” Gideon answers. The pain already seems to be receding, replaced by a yawning confusion that’s growing by the second. 

“Thank God - can you sit up?”

With a deep heft, Gideon manages to push herself into a sitting position. She finds herself in the mud, under a gnarled old tree, a soft breeze sending the anemic foliage around them swaying. There are two men above her, Kaiserliche just like her. She doesn’t know them, but with an army several thousand strong, she can hardly be expected to recognize everyone. 

“We didn’t think anyone made it around to the west,” one of them says as he holds out a hand to her. She takes it, hauling herself up, slipping a bit in the fresh mud from the rain. 

“I -” Gideon says, and then stops, taking a look around. 

The boy is face down in the muck, blood swirled around him. One shoulder is almost cleaved clean through. If the grievous torso wound wasn’t enough of a tell, the grey pallor of his skin makes it very clear that he has not survived. 

Something seems very wrong here. Gideon remembers his knife, remembers it shredding into her neck, up across her ear. She raises a hand without much thought, feeling the jut of her chin and the curve of the shell of her ear, but everything seems intact and in the correct place. 

She remembers thinking, right before she lost consciousness, that she was going to die. 

“Here,” one of her fellows says, and when she turns back he’s holding her zweihänder out to her. It, like every other part of her body and kit, is caked in mud. She might never get all the muck out. 

“You seem quite lucky,” the other says, with a nod towards the corpse in their company. “Not a scratch on you.”

“Yes,” Gideon says, brows furrowed. _Somehow._

\---

She wakes at dawn. Another night of fitful sleep stolen by the ghosts haunting her nightmares. Swinging her feet onto the ground, she puts her face in her hands and takes deep, centering breaths. 

She’s been stationary too long. Her sword and gun have been hidden under the bed, tucked up against the slats, for too long. She’s been in this house for too long, the guest of the girl currently hogging most of the blankets. 

But the girl is dying. Gideon can’t bear to move on, can’t bear to get back to work. 

Turning back, she watches the labored rise and fall of Dulcinea’s bare chest. She’s always so pale, so in contrast to Gideon’s sun warmed skin.

One drowsy eye opens with a lanquidity that can only come from dying wealthy. When she stretches, her hair spread across the pillow, Gideon can see her ribs move beneath her skin. 

“Nightmares again?” Dulcinea asks in her scratchy voice. Gideon just nods. “Give me  _ all _ the sordid details.”

One side of Gideon’s mouth twitches up at that. 

“You don’t want details,” Gideon says. 

“Oh, but I do,” Dulcinea says. “Are they about whatever life you get up to with the lovely things hidden beneath the bed,  cariña? ”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gideon says casually. 

“Yes you do,” Dulcinea says. “I know you’re some kind of soldier, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. You don’t have to stay here with me playing nursemaid, you know. I have plenty of actual maids to do that. I have Pro. I have my awfully overbearing parents. If you need to go hack and slash at something, you can. Find some other girl to strike dumb with your boyish good looks and incredibly talented…  _ everything _ .”

Dulcinea’s eyebrows are high, her eyes wide, her smile wicked. 

“I want to stay,” Gideon says, heat coloring her cheeks. 

“Well then, come back to bed,” Dulcinea says, throwing the covers back, long body on display against the cream of the sheets. “Maybe I can die mid-bedding.”

“ _ Dulcie _ -” Gideon says, and now her eyebrows are raised. 

Dulcinea licks her lips. Gideon comes back to bed. 

\---

Gideon is sure she died. She’s absolutely sure of it. But something seems to have gone very wrong, considering she’s not dead. 

Or maybe she is. Maybe this is Heaven. Considering she’s currently scrubbing at her gear in foul water, she hopes to God it’s not, but she has no real way of knowing. 

Everything seems very normal. She has no idea what to do, so she does what she always does - cleans herself up and returns to her tent, as mud free as she can possibly be. Otto is the only one there, swaddled in blankets and staring at the canvas walls like he’s seeing through them to some other world. 

“We’ve been halved,” Otto says. His voice is far away from here. 

“I’m sorry,” Gideon says, because she has no idea what else to say. She’s shared this tent with Maximillian and Paul for months, the same amount as Otto. They were closer though, the three of them. Gideon knows not to get too close to anyone, knows not to let anything slip. 

“How are we untouched?” Otto asks, and he finally turns to her. 

“I don’t know,” Gideon answers honestly. 

\---

There is Dulcinea, in Madrid. Gideon knows she is dying from day one, and there is something refreshing about that, and how she handles it. She coaxes Gideon from being mediocre at Spanish to being passable, and shares her home and her bed. 

There is Elizabeth, in Oxford. She has golden hair and an incredible laugh and an awful twin sister who Gideon can never seem to get the hang of. Gideon doesn’t stay with her for too long, leaves so that she can always remember Elizabeth as she is in that moment. 

There are others, women splashed across the pages of Gideon’s now too long history. 

She closes up more and more, draws her own spirit up within herself. Keeps to herself. Works as a mercenary, works as a blacksmith, works in the night with knives and her bare hands when the situation is delicate and the pay is monumental. 

And then, one day, there is the specter and her two ghosts. 

\---

Gideon went back to the location of the gnarled old tree one day. Or, rather, as close as she could get - now, all of these centuries later, there are streets and shops and homes. 

The tree is long gone. She’s still here. 

Maybe this corner outside of the walls of Laon could be called her home, but it’s hard to tell. She’s never been quite comfortable with the meaning of  _ home _ . 

\---

Her parents die a black death. There is nothing unique about this, her whole generation is awash in plague orphans. She’s too young to remember anything about them, no single shreds or glimmers of memory. 

For a while, she lives with an aunt. It’s not ideal, but it’s acceptable. She spends her waking hours doing chores, and at night, gets the barest of sleep in her small attic room. It gets more and more cramped under the eaves as the years drag on. 

A cousin stops by one day, someone so distantly related that Gideon isn’t quite sure how and where their family trees intersect. He takes one look at Gideon and her height and shoulders and makes some kind of back alley deal with her aunt. 

His farm is so different from the city she’s lived her whole life in that it’s a shock to the system. 

She stands in the rolling hills, on the edge of the trees, and slowly, very slowly, learns to be someone new. The heat of the forge and the glow of the sun warm her skin. The rough wood of a scythe and the uneven surface of rolled stone calluses her palms. 

She will always remember those smells, the cut chaff and the fired metal, as red in its first blush with fire as her hair. 

\---

Soon, they are marching again. Soon, there is another battle to be fought. 

While the first time it had happened she’d been wracked by confusion and uncertainty, there is no question this time that she is dying when the pike takes her clear through the stomach. 

Something crunches within her. It is horrible, beyond this world, and she finds herself caught on the end of a pole, spilling blood and guts, pain beyond anything shrieking up her spine so fast that she is afraid it will take her apart. 

The weapon is yanked back, cruelly pulled from her, and she falls to the trampled ground with a gasping sob, a half cry. 

Watching the battle on her side, a shoulder pressed into the hard dirt, she expects her vision to dim. Expects the pain to take her fully as her life gushes from her. 

Instead, when she presses one shaking hand to her stomach, she can already feel the fabric of her body stitching itself together. 

It is terrifying. Dying would have been easier. 

\---

The specter is here, standing ten paces from her. She carries a slim black sword at her hip and wears a bow of incredible craftsmanship across her chest. 

In the darkness she seems made of shades of grey. 

When she moves, it’s so fast that Gideon believes her truly a ghost, some figment from another plane of existence. 

\---

If her home is not the space that was once under a skeletal elm and is now a street corner, it is the rolling hills of a still rural landscape. 

She’s been back there, too. She’s gotten sentimental in her old age. 

Some of the old stone outbuildings are still there. One she recognizes as something built by her own hands. 

If it is neither of those places -

\---

The morning Dulcinea dies is, cruelly, a beautiful one. Gideon comes awake slowly, staring into the sun streaming in through the windows, the beams slanted elegantly in the first light of the morning. 

She rolls over, and instantly knows what the silence of the bed means. 

“Dulcie,” Gideon whispers into the quiet. Not even labored breathing greets her. “ _ Dulcie _ .”

She knows it’s a fool's errand, but she can’t help it, can’t help the way she reacts as she scrambles across the covers, reaching out with shaking hands to carefully roll Dulcinea onto her back. 

She is gracile even in death, long limbs pale and too finely boned. Her lips are bluing, her skin going grey. The deep bloom of bruising is already growing on the side she was sleeping on. 

Gideon lowers her head, presses her forehead to the crook of Dulcinea’s neck and shoulder and balls her hands into fists - one in the sheets, one in her nightclothes. 

She screams at the cold against her own warm skin, muffling the sound into the body. Her face is wet. Her whole body shivers like a leaf in the autumn. 

She screams until there’s no more noise in her body, her throat destroyed and raw as she gulps down breath. The worst thing is, she can feel her sore throat already fixing itself, paving the way for new growth and healing. A gift that Gideon never asked for, a gift that she would have given anything to bestow upon the girl under her. 

Eventually, there is a knock at the door. 

“Go away,” Gideon says, and her voice is strong again, her body working against the pain she wants to feel. 

The door cracks open. Something falls to the floor. A gasp. 

Hands on her, pulling her away so that figures can crowd in. Through the disorienting dizziness, Gideon can see that it’s the doctor and a maid, frantically checking the body like it might still have a pulse, might still draw breath. 

“She’s dead,” Gideon says. She is ignored. She tries again. “She’s  _ dead _ .”

No one responds. 

\---

There is a storm coming. Clouds are gathering on the horizon, wide and unfathomable as they charge towards them. 

Harrow has her face turned up to the sun, still shining in defiance of the coming clouds. 

“Do you know,” she says, and Gideon turns to her, turns away from the far off clouds spilling rain into the dry sands, “that every time you say my name you keep me alive?”

“Pretty sure that’s whatever mumbo jumbo is keeping us breathing past our expiration dates, not my mouth,” Gideon says, and then smirks. “That’s what-”

“Griddle, for many gods’ sakes, don’t ruin the moment.” Her eyes drop from the sky, focus on Gideon with the force of a thousand years and more. That gaze is always unnerving, always sends a thrill up Gideon’s spine. A fight, a battle, a war, all wrapped up in her night-colored eyes. It’s a promise that Gideon will always keep. A prayer that she will always honor. 

“Sorry, that’s kind of what I do,” Gideon says. 

“As long as someone speaks your name, you never die,” Harrow says, coming closer over the dusty ruined floor. Cracked pillars, long bleached by the sun god Harrow was born under, stretch into the darkening sky above them. 

Here, in Luxor, among the ruins of Waset, it is easy to imagine Harrow as who she was before her first death. 

“I’ve heard that,” Gideon says. 

Harrow stops a heartbeat from her, and when she smiles, it is something out of Gideon’s dreams. 

“Have you, Gideon Zell?”

“I have, Harwahedjet.”

\---

Harrow is cocooned in a blanket, tucked into one of the two chairs the tiny flat has room for. Outside, rain drums on the windows, drenching an already sopping world. 

She discards her shoes and umbrella just outside the door, in a hallway lit by anemic light and full of so many other flats worth of umbrellas and shoes. 

“Camilla’s in town,” Harrow says, not looking up from the book she has balanced on her knees as she turns a page. 

“I know, my  toxophilitic mistress,” Gideon says and flips on a light. “You really  _ do _ like to lurk in the dark.”

“I’m hardly lurking,” Harrow says. 

She finally looks up at Gideon with those perfect kohl ringed eyes of hers, and offers her a small smile. 

\---

Her cousin teaches her how to tend the forge, how to light it and keep it smoldering. It is bracing, nurturing a fire that reeks of metal and ash as the temperatures soar that summer. It makes her feel alive. 

Her cousin’s wife teaches her how to care for the animals as she cares for the forge. 

Their children teach her how to turn the fields with them, walking long rows, skirts catching brambles and aprons turning the color of the dust and dirt they tend day after day. 

She had assumed she loved the city. She had assumed it was her home. 

If it is not her home -

\---

The girl from her dreams is here, painted in greys that smudge gold and silver in the moonlight, standing out against the stark stone of the stairs she stands on. 

Gideon watches as she slings her bow from her body, pulls an arrow from a cleverly hidden quiver, and nocks it without looking. 

It is fletched with black so dark it rivals the night itself. 

Gideon can feel the fight rising in her, can feel her sword hand twitch for a weapon she doesn’t currently have on her person. 

Before she can move, the girl moves, and then there is only blackness. 

\---

The oldest son, Ortus, decides he is going to join the army. 

Gideon’s cousin is rather stoic and silent about it. Gideon’s cousin’s wife is angry, a blustery wind slamming through the house as she raises Hell about how he is choosing his own death. 

He still goes. 

Gideon goes with him. She swears him to secrecy, binds her chest, and blesses her dead mother for giving her a man’s name in her last fevered throws of life. 

The first time a sword is placed in her hands, it feels like a natural extension of the broom of her aunt’s house, of the hammer of her cousin’s forge. 

It feels like home. 

\---

In the dreams, the young woman dies over and over and over. Gideon sees a thousand places and a thousand eras, most unknown to her, but the most frequent death is the one in the desert, the one with the dark horse. 

She is part of a flank, a trio on horseback that are cresting dunes under a wide open blue sky. Somewhere, in the distance, as Gideon sees through the girl’s eyes, a line of cavalry and charioteers are massing in the valley. 

When the girl speaks, Gideon can’t understand a damn word, can’t even make out a single syllable, the language so alien that she has no way to place it. 

In the distance, in the sandy pass, the chanting starts, the crying and the bellowing that turns into one long churning noise as the army streams from between the hills like a river unleashed from its banks. 

Someone says something in those strange words, and the trio go hurtling down the side of the dune, sand flying, horses powering under them. 

Time jumps, the battle fragmenting as the world slides apart and then together. 

The young woman loses her horse first, the animal brought down by an arrow. 

She loses her sword next. 

She stands on impossibly steady feet with her bow raised, a small figure in a sea of carnage, and fires shot after shot, until her quiver is empty and the sand is crimson around her. 

She does not see the chariot that comes up behind her. Does not see as she is cut down and ground under the wheels, into the bloody swell of the valley floor. 

\---

It is dusk, and Gideon is not dead. 

She sits up slowly, finds herself in one whole piece, no terrifying pike wound clear through her. 

No more can she try to convince herself that the first time was a fluke. No more can she try to convince herself that she was just lucky, that day under the elm. 

She hunches over, there in the middle of broken bodies, horse and man alike, and braces her head on her arms, braces her arms on her knees, and her feet on the solid ground. Anything to remind herself that this life is her own. 

It would be easier if she felt something, but that crushing, all consuming pain is gone. The only thing she feels is the soft breeze through her hair, her helmet long gone, and the uneven dirt under her body. 

She stands up. They have not come through for the dead yet. It is rough going, picking her way across this field of all the people who have not been given this strange, awful gift that Gideon has. Some of them have not quite managed to die yet, and a chorus of wails and groans and deathly breath follow her. 

She walks. She walks until she hits the tree line, she walks through the forest, she walks as the night darkens. 

Piece by piece she strips away her plates, her kit, her uniform, until she is in bare feet and breeches and her binding, zweihänder in one hand and arquebus in the other. 

There is a stream, a silvery scar through the trees. She tosses her musket and sword down on the banks and wades into it, shivering a bit at the sudden chill. 

“ _ O Gott, von dem ich alles haben _ , what the  _ Hell _ , what on your damned  _ Earth _ , you absolute piece of  _ shit- _ ”

She stays shivering in that stream for a long time, cursing her creator out as many ways to his holy day as she can, but nothing changes. The night still drags on. Her feet will not freeze all the way. Figuring out which way is up and which way is down remains immeasurably difficult now that she’s realized death has refused her twice. 

Eventually, she splashes out of the water to reclaim her sword, to heft it up. 

She holds it high, raising it above her head, and drives the point down through her foot. 

“Herr Gott  _ nochmal _ ,” she swears, gasping as the pain sets her leg on fire. She pulls the sword free of her foot and watches, in stunned silence, as the blood goes from gushing to spilling to trickling and then finally nothing, leaving her foot whole and unblemished against the bloody ground. 

\---

She haunts the halls. She haunts the gardens. When she finally returns to the house, she finds Dulcinea’s mother sitting like a statue in one of the parlors, alone in a ray of sun. 

Gideon no longer has any words left in her. She has no tears left. 

She sits down next to the woman, staring at the far wall in tandem with her. A hand snakes out, takes hers in its grip, a vice and a prayer and a lifeline. Gideon squeezes the hand back.

That evening, she slips away, weapons on her back and boots on her feet. 

She tries again, once, a few years later, with Elizabeth, but she is too much, and Gideon realizes that she has to turn her back on this all together. Elizabeth will grow old and die, and Gideon cannot bear that. 

So she leaves, and leaves Elizabeth a golden flame in her mind, burning bright and whole and full of youth. 

\---

She dreams of the other two, the ghost in the grey and the one with the two swords, but not the girl with the kohl eyes. 

When she comes to on the steps, she does so with a rasping gasp, a long held breath finally exhaled, her spine arching on the smooth stone. 

The moon is overhead, gorgeous and full. 

Gideon clambers up onto hands and shins, kneeling up and staring up at where the arrow had come from. It had taken her through the eye, she is fairly sure, but of course that type of thing doesn’t stick anymore. 

The archer is much closer than she expected. Without much thought, she springs forward, launching herself at the girl with every last bit of muscle and sinew she possesses, taking the girl in the chest headfirst. 

The specter’s skull cracking against the steps rings out in the piazza behind them, a sickening crack that Gideon makes worse by pushing her weight down, snapping the girl’s neck. 

She reels back, breathing hard, that now well-known thrum of battle rising in her even as the threat lies dead on the steps, blood pooling from the back of her head. Gideon can see her clearly for the first time, not in a dream, not standing at pace in the dark like a shadow. 

Gideon peers closer, at the sandy tan skin and the black curls. Her gut churns - she hates this - but the girl had seen what she was, and loose ends are not a good thing to have. 

She bends so close that their noses are almost touching.

The kohl eyes snap back open, and there is a hand at her throat. A gaze that betrays millennia of histories bores into Gideon, stripping her bare and flaying her mind from her body. 

A thrill runs through her, the jolt of a summer storm coursing up her spine. 

“You’re like me,” Gideon scratches out even as the hand tightens. Her knife cut grin is all teeth. “You’re  _ just _ like me.”

The immortal under Gideon drops her hand, juts her chin out, and offers Gideon a silent challenge in that gaze. 

Gideon rises to it. There is a storm coming. 

\---

She has had a hard time defining what home means, her past as twisted and broken as it is. It was  Cölln, and then the farm, and then the army. 

It was a tree outside of Laon. It was a set of stairs at midnight leading out of a piazza in Rome. 

If it is now none of those places, it is instead her sword, reforged half a dozen times over the centuries. It is Cam and Palamades, and wherever they happen to be at any given moment. 

It is a girl that Gideon will not let die, as long as they both live.

\---

The archer is staying in a disused set of apartments, clearly belonging to someone wealthy who is also very clearly not in town. There are drop cloths over most of the furniture, the front two rooms untouched. 

She leads Gideon through the dark maze of gilded walls and high ceilings until they reach a dead end. 

Here, it finally feels like a home. The kitchen is free of sheeted furniture and there is a fire roaring in the large hearth. There are chairs and stools pulled up close to the flames, two of them currently occupied by people and a third by cards, serving as a table. 

The two turn as one when they walk in. Silhouette by the fire, it takes Gideon a moment to place them. 

Her specter’s ghosts. The woman has blunt cut short hair and is stripped down to a loose chemise that does not hide the scars on her chest and shoulders and neck. Gideon can see the glimmer of even more on her hands and arms in the firelight. She knows from experience that those are scars older than this woman’s first death, memories and reminders of her mortal life, when any of those wounds might have stolen her away into death. 

The man, even hunched over as he is, is clearly quite tall. He has shining grey eyes and shorn hair. There is a shrewd intelligence in that gaze, something that makes Gideon fidget under his visual inspection of her. 

“Glad to see we’ve finally found you,” the man says, standing up and displaying that Gideon is right about his height. His German is lanced with a curious accent that she can’t quite place. “I’m Palamedes of Sestos, and this is  Camilla Heius Dimachaerus.”

“Pardon?” Gideon asks, blinking at the onslaught of names. 

“Just Camilla is fine,” the woman says before jerking her thumb in the direction of the girl at Gideon’s side. “And that’s Harrow. Unless she’s already introduced herself.” 

“She hasn’t, actually,” Gideon says, looking down at the specter - at  _ Harrow _ \- out of the corner of her eye. She doesn’t move, just blinks once, sharp and dark. 

“And you are?” Palamades asks. 

“Gideon Zell,” she says, a name that she now knows she’ll carry for lifetimes stretching into infinity. 

\---

She does not dream of them anymore, except in the abstract way that known people pop up in dreams. They are sparse, few and far between. 

While it is somewhat easy to fall into a comfortable rhythm with Cam and Palamades, Harrow is something else. Harrow is the leader, that much is clear, but she is also the most rigid, the most likely to test something over and over again before she sets out on a path. 

Everyone they do jobs for must be checked, re-checked, and then in triplicate as well. If they prove to be untrustworthy after the fact, Harrow will send Cam out to deal with them. 

And then, later, she will send Gideon. At first, Gideon bristles at it, under this assumption that she will do dirty work at the first sign of trouble. Then, she accepts it. 

At some point, when Harrow turns those sharply bottomless eyes on her, Gideon finds herself standing without thought, hand twitching for her sword, the haze of a fight already rising. 

\---

The flies are murderously plentiful this summer. Gideon wrinkles her nose and stamps her feet like a horse, shaking her head out to get them off of her exposed forearms and neck. 

“ _ Verdammt _ ,” she mutters as she bends back down to tie off another bushel. 

“What is the purpose of every single one of these cursed bugs?” Ortus sighs. “If they all died right now, what would even happen? The world would go on spinning and we wouldn’t be covered in bites.”

“The birds might go hungry,” Gideon says. “I mean - do birds eat flies? I honestly have no idea.”

“Birds eat everything,” Ortus says, hefting his scythe back into his hands. “Keep moving on?”

“It’s the only thing to do,” Gideon says, and finishes the knot on the twined bundle with a sharp yank. 

\---

She struggles out of the stream, teeth chattering, and walks, following the water through the dark forest. 

Her feet blister, her skin scratches against rocks, splinters catch her legs. 

It all heals, over and over and over again. 

Eventually, she finds a mill on the waterway. Someone has strung the washing up to dry between two trees, and although she feels exceedingly guilty about it, she needs clothing. Even if her uniform were not scattered in downed pieces miles and miles back, she still couldn’t wear it. She’d be marked as a deserter in a moment. 

She hasn’t worn a dress in going on two years, but as she tugs on the slightly damp chemise and laces up the brown kirtle she finds it’s an easy enough guise to slip into. 

The longsword and musket across her back are a bit of a strange sight, but she’ll deal with a way to hide them away later. There is never a question in her mind that she would leave them behind. 

\---

Niš is smothered under a heavy blanket of snow. The mountains, normally white-capped, are now nothing but a slide of snow all the way down to the city. It has, for the briefest of moments, ceased some of the ghastly activities of the city. 

Harrow had sent her out for food and any word from Cam and Palamades about how they’re doing in Istanbul. While she’s empty handed on the letter front - the postmaster had informed her in bored, flat tones that nothing was getting through the mountain pass right now - she has procured food . Börek again, but she’s also managed to find some apples of dubious quality. 

She’d found a journal in the market, as well. It had caught her eye due to the incredible filigree work done on its leather cover, and then she’d resolved to spend too much money on it when the merchant had flipped it open to show the scrawling handwriting inside. 

She’s seen that writing before, many times. The version she’s used to is more cramped, a bit more brittle, but she recognizes it all the same. 

“No post on account of the absolute banger of a storm,” Gideon says when she returns to the small house they’re renting in a quiet neighborhood on the edge of town. She stamps her boots clean and shakes the snow off of her bangs, leaving a small, wet circle around herself. 

“I was afraid of that,” Harrow says, looking over at Gideon. She’s crouched down, all bony haunches and shoulders as she pokes at the fire. 

“But, I got us food, and -” here she tosses the journal to Harrow with a smug smile. Harrow’s eyes flare open for the briefest of moments before a hand reaches up like a snake to snap the leather-bound volume from the air. 

She’s learning, Gideon can tell. Getting used to all the little idiosyncrasies that Gideon can - sometimes literally - throw at her. 

Slim, ink stained fingers run down the spine, and something in Gideon thrills to watch the motion in the firelight. 

“What is this?” Harrow asks even as she’s already flipping it open. 

The look of amazement that blooms on Harrow’s face as she stands is a victory to behold. 

“Demotic, right?” Gideon asks. 

“Yes,” Harrow murmurs. 

She looks straight at Gideon, intensity bearing down between them. The fire roars behind her, and beyond that, outside the windows, the storm howls. 

\---

“What are you working on?” Gideon asks. 

“Give me a few more days and you’ll see,” Harrow says, closing up the book she’s scribbling in the margins of. “What did you tell Camilla?”

“That we’ll do it,” Gideon says with a shrug as she comes to stand in front of Harrow, looming over her. “Vacation’s over.”

“I’m glad. We’ve been stagnant for too long.”

“You would think that.  _ I _ am very much enjoying a bit of rest and relaxation.”

“No you’re not. You’re bored. You’re too much to be cooped up here, pretending to be some kind of…  _ civilian _ .”

Gideon cracks a smile, braces herself on the back of the chair so she can curve her body over Harrow. 

“I do miss my sword,” Gideon admits as Harrow fidgets for a moment. Hundreds of years and sometimes Harrow still blurs into that specter, smearing and tearing through town with bitten nails and chewed lips. 

“Let’s go liberate it then, shall we?” Harrow asks. 

“Later,” Gideon says, bending lower. 

\---

“I thought I was alone,” Gideon says, offering a hand out to Harrow. 

“We all did,” Palamades says from the gently rocking boat. Every few laps of water it’s bumping against the low step that Gideon’s planted on, hitting the shin of her now very soaked boots. 

“I was,” Harrow says, taking Gideon’s hand as leverage to spring across the gap between the door and boat. Even through her gloves, her hand radiates the warmth of a desert. 

“But none of us have to be, now,” Cam points out as Gideon leaps aboard last, bringing a spray of water with her. 

They cut through the inky darkness, sliding cleanly under the low bridges with their street signs. Gideon counts them, matching their number up to the map in her head, her Venetian not good enough to remember the names. 

“I trust you to do what needs to be done,” Harrow murmurs to her, low and conspiratorially, and Gideon bobs her head.

“This is the easy part,” Gideon admits. 

It always has been, the drumming, throbbing  _ need _ that comes over her, when she has a sword in her hands and a fight brewing around her. 

They turn towards each other in the deep night cloaking the canal, and Gideon finds that same inky deepness in the eyes boring back into hers. 

\---

“It’s a travel journal,” Harrow says as she walks back and forth across the room, flipping through the book. Gideon would call it pacing, but it’s not, not really. There’s something too controlled for it to be that. 

“What’s it say?” Gideon says, reclining on the low, threadbare sofa. 

“It’s a history of the Amarna period,” Harrow says. “Did you know that when you bought it?”

Gideon shakes her head, shaving another piece of apple off with her knife and popping it into her mouth. It’s cold and mealy, but it’s been long enough since she’s had fresh fruit that she can’t find herself too bothered by it. 

“So it means something to you?” Gideon asks around a mouthful of apple. 

“Of course it does,” Harrow says, suddenly still, focus on Gideon. “I was born under Aten into the Amarna period. It is the history of my place and my people down to almost the exact moment. Palamades and Camilla didn’t tell you?”

“Nope,” Gideon says, feeling both gobsmacked and smug that she’s accidentally bought Harrow something so perfect. 

“Part of it is the Great Hymn to Aten - a poem, I suppose you could call it. Aten is the Sun, broken from Ra’s control and made his own being. I of course was raised to worship a myriad of gods, but Aten was above all during my life. The Palace wrote the original text,” Harrow says. 

“Read me some of it?” Gideon asks. 

Harrow snaps the journal closed and shuts her eyes, standing preternaturally still. Gideon frowns, and is opening her mouth to protest when -

“ _ A Hymn of praise for the living one exalted in the Eastern Horizon in his name who is in the Aten _ ,” Harrow says, her voice low and powerful, the words clearly imprinted so clearly onto her memory that they’re as known to her as her own hand. “ _ Who liveth for ever and ever, the living and great Aten, he who is in the Set-Festival, the lord of the Circle, the Lord of the Disk, the Lord of heaven, the Lord of earth, the lord of the House of the Aten _ .”

Gideon doesn’t mean to hold her breath and stop breathing, but she does anyway, held in rapture by a god she’ll never know as he speaks through the specter from Gideon’s dreams. 

“Breathe, Griddle,” Harrow says. 

Gideon lets out a long breath, her skin warm. 

\---

In Venice, she and Cam take the front line. They cut through the guards easily, swords singing like a peal of church bells as they cut and parry, sidestep and lunge. They give each other just enough breadth, Gideon aware of Cam’s lightning fast twin blades and Cam just as knowing of Gideon’s long, bruising two-hander. 

Palamedes brings up the rear, fists and knives and careful grapples if anyone is left alive. 

Harrow runs on silent feet in the gallery above them, arrow nocked, eyes ahead. 

This is how they work. It is how they accomplish the jobs they need to do, it is how they are able to work as a unit as they spill blood across the continent, and sometimes, clear across the world. 

In Venice. In Fes. In Kandiye. In Moscow. Gideon did not know how big the world was. She’s still not sure she does, or even if she ever will. 

\---

“Later,” Gideon says. 

Rain drums against the windows as the city glows in the fog. Harrow’s eyes are dark pools, her lips chapped and bitten as always, and Gideon moves one hand to cup the side of Harrow’s neck, to feel the heat and the pulse there under the sandy skin. 

Harrow juts her chin out -

\---

The storm has come, and will not leave. The wind still rattles the shutters late into the night. 

Harrow comes to sit next to her, nibbles on an apple without seeming to taste it, staring into the fire as it burns lower and lower, yellow to orange to red. 

“I don’t know how to even think about how old you are,” Gideon says. 

“It’s not something that any human mind was ever built to conceive of,” Harrow says, staring down at her apple. 

“I can barely wrap my head around how old I am,” Gideon says. 

“You’re 107,” Harrow answers. There is a distance in her voice. 

“Yes, I know  _ that _ ,” Gideon says with a huff, pulling herself up into a sitting position on the lumpy sofa. 

“A child,” Harrow murmurs. 

“Only to you. Well, and I suppose Cam and Pal. But to the rest of the world, I’m ancient. It’s strangely comforting that someone still thinks I’m an infant,” Gideon says. “Do you think I’m the oldest person in the world right now?”

“No you idiot, I am,” Harrow says. It’s a simple fact. 

Gideon grins at her, cocks her head and shoves Harrow in the shoulder. The young woman turns to her, small face pinched up in a frown. 

“No frowns,” Gideon says. 

When she reaches up to brush a thumb over Harrow’s brow, she does not expect Harrow to lean into it, to press one cheek into the rough skin of Gideon’s palm. 

Gideon did not know she could still feel like she was dying. 

\---

Even though the gear has changed, even though the weapons are different and the tactics have had to be tweaked and updated, this is still what they do. This is still how they do it. 

Gideon and Cam take point. Gideon has her two-hander across her back, can just see the pommel out of the eye that’s not currently looking down the sights of her UMP as they clear rooms and hallways. Cam works close to her, covering her other side. 

Palamedes brings up the rear, looking rather mild mannered in comparison to Gideon and Cam’s half gun-half sword overkill. 

Gideon knows that it’s just a ruse. The man has knives strapped down to every inch of his too-tall body. 

“How are we looking, Harrow?” Palamedes asks. 

“ _ Next corner clear. Take the second door on the right. I’ll meet you around the other side of the building. _ ” Her voice comes across flat and distorted around the edges over the radio. 

“Roger,” Cam says. 

The fight gets a little messy when they reach their corner office target. Specifically, Gideon gets shot in the knee. 

“ _ Fuck fuck fuck _ -” she seethes, hopping on the other foot as she hurls 5 pounds of metal and plastic at the shooter’s face and Pal and Cam fight at her back against the other guards in the room. 

Not shockingly, he dodges the airborne UMP, but it gives her enough time to unsheathe her sword. 

She charges him, limping as her knee heels under her, gritting her teeth against the pain. His surprise at seeing her using a sword is an open, dull expression. 

His head is very suddenly missing a large chunk. There is blood and bone splattered from her chin to her chest. Gideon skids to a stop as the guard topples. Without him in the way, she has a gorgeous view of Victoria Harbor, the skyline lit up across the water. Shattered glass litters the floor, sparkling shards of neon lit up the same colors as the towering skyscrapers. 

_ “You’re welcome _ ,” Harrow says, and Gideon can hear the  _ clink _ of a shell casing hitting a rooftop on the next building over, a sharp, clean noise across the radio. 

Gideon grins. 

\---

“Should I recite more of the hymn?” Harrow asks as her eyes flutter closed, her long lashes dark against her skin. 

“No more words,” Gideon says. Her voice sounds like she’s been running. 

She pushes Harrow down slowly, languid and with all the time in the world. Harrow, dressed in her customary blacks, is a smudge of coal on the sofa. Gideon curves over her, watches the way her chest rises and falls and her throat bobs. 

Harrow juts out her chin, and Gideon sinks into the dared affirmation. 

By the time Gideon presses her lips to the bridge of Harrow’s nose, they’re both shivering. Perhaps from the white-out raging beyond the windows. Perhaps from the way they spark together. 

Gideon kisses down Harrow’s nose, across her cheek, the corner of her lips, and then -

\---

Gideon kisses her, lets her body relax into it. It’s as easy for Gideon as holding her sword, as easy as breathing, and it is perfect. 

Harrow shoves the blanket and her book aside so that Gideon can straddle her on the chair, cradling the back of Harrow’s head as something sears through the kiss, a bruising need and hunger that they’ll always know for each other. 

“Once this job is done,” Gideon says against Harrow’s lips. “We’re going somewhere with a  _ giant _ bed. Like, truly massive.”

“Stop talking,” Harrow instructs her, digs her long fingers into Gideon’s waist. 

“Yes, my umbral marchioness.”

“ _ Griddle _ -”

Gideon does not let Harrow finish whatever very unimportant thing she was going to say. 

\---

If her home is not a place, then it is not the long grass underneath a gnarled tree where she first died. It is not outside the old walls of Laon, on her back, wondering if she has had a horrible dream of her death without it actually happening.

It is not the fields of her cousin’s farm. It is not the long plow rows of wheat that they worked over hot summers, swatting away the flies and slicing lengths of rough twine. Not the goats or the chickens or her distant family. 

It is not the cramped streets of  Cölln , in the small room under the rafters in her aunt’s attic. 

It is a person. 

\---

“You know if you keep threatening to write me a proper translation of that damn thing, one day you’re actually going to have to,” Gideon tells Harrow as they descend into the Metro. 

“Perhaps,” Harrow says, that far away look in her eye that Gideon knows well at this point. 

Far away in time, far away in distance, but she always finds her way back home. Back to Gideon. 

\---

Gideon steps out of the bathroom still damp, hair plastered over her forehead and clothes stuck to her tanned skin. In this weather, where it’s raining and so humid as to make the air feel like a weight, she knows it’s useless to try to dry off totally. 

Harrow, having fought this particular battle from behind the scope of her rifle, is sitting on the small bed, clean without having to work for it. 

Gideon really had to scrub to get all the soft tissue out of her hair. Harrow had been using some  _ very _ high caliber rounds. 

“This is for you,” Harrow says, holding up a small pat of folded pages. Gideon raises an eyebrow, flopping down on the bed on her stomach as she unfolds. 

There, scrawled across several pieces of paper in Harrow’s sharp, cramped handwriting, are words that she recognizes. 

_ A Hymn of praise for the living one exalted in the Eastern Horizon.  _

She can’t stop the small grin that comes as she reads, can’t help the heat on her cheeks as she thinks of Harrow painstakingly working through the translation to make sure it’s perfect, even though she has whole swaths of the damn thing committed to memory. 

“You finished my translation,” Gideon murmurs, turning onto her side to face Harrow. 

Harrow looks almost nervous, flicking a loose thread on the hem of her pants back and forth as she twitches her bare toes. 

“I did promise,” Harrow says. 

“I think you threatened, actually,” Gideon says. 

“I have been known to do that,” Harrow says. 

Gideon sets the pages aside very carefully, knowing what went into them, and stretches out a hand. Harrow takes it, locks their fingers together, and Gideon pulls her across the mussed sheets. 

Harrow curves above her, the lights from the rainy city blooming around her dark curls, haloing her in the life of the city. 

“ _ Thy rising is beautiful in the horizon _ , Harwahedjet,” Gideon murmurs. 

Harrow’s resulting smile is like the sun after a storm, the first rays through a still misty sky. 

“As is yours, Gideon,” Harrow says, jaw forward, and kisses her. 


End file.
